Automate media processing jobs

In today’s fast-paced world, delivering high-quality media content to a global audience has become a critical aspect of many businesses. The traditional methods of media delivery, such as satellite and terrestrial networks, are becoming less feasible because of the high costs, complexity, and limitations associated with these systems.

Here, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Media Flow service comes in as a game changer in the media delivery landscape. In this blog, we review how we can automate media processing with OCI Media Flow using OCI prebuilt functions.

What is Media Flow?

OCI Media Flow is a cloud-based media processing solution provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It provides a flexible and scalable platform for delivering high-quality video content over the internet to a global audience. The solution uses the power of OCI’s highly available and secure infrastructure to deliver a reliable and high-quality media delivery experience to end-users.

OCI Media Flow provides processing through media workflow-based approach. You can customize the media workflow to do tasks like transcodes, speech to text outputs, object detection, text detection, and thumbnail generations. After a media workflow is configured, you can create media workflow jobs to run for each media file that needs the processing. These media files must be on OCI Object Storage for the media workflow job to pick it up for processing. After processing, the output files are sent to OCI Object Storage and optionally also to OCI Media Streams.

Why automate media processing?

Media files can be large when they come from a camera, and often they need edits to make the video or audio more reachable for the audience. OCI Media Flow requires you to pass the media file details to the media workflow job. So, if you have 100 files to process, select those 100 files to submit 100 media workflow jobs. This process is doubtlessly time-consuming and costly.

How to automate media processing

OCI now offers prebuilt functions that allow you to create OCI Function solutions using standard codes from Oracle that you can use and not manage. In the prebuilt functions catalog, we have a “Media Workflow Job Spawner” code that lets you automate those 100 jobs to be processed as they’re uploaded to OCI Object Storage.

Source: oracle.com

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Announcing new capabilities for radically simple cloud infrastructure

Core cloud infrastructure is the foundation for your cloud estate. Like the engine of your car, its purpose is to get the job done, consistently and quietly. But, just as our automobile engines have been evolving from gasoline-powered to hybrid and electric motors, that do the same thing, but more efficiently, your core cloud infrastructure can – and should – continue to evolve and improve. 

OCI has been evaluated by industry analysts as providing required IaaS and PaaS capabilities for cloud workloads.  We are continuing to innovate and today at Oracle Cloud World, we announced new compute, storage, and networking capabilities that can simplify how you use core cloud infrastructure. They range from compute instances and block volumes that can dynamically adjust to meet demand to high performance NVIDIA GPU instances that can dramatically simplify AI training and graphics workloads. These capabilities are intended to provide flexibility, ease of use, security, and high performance.  

Flexible infrastructure

According to Omdia, cloud providers package resources, such as standard compute instances with 2 CPUs and 8 GB of memory. This configuration creates a burden on customers to appropriately size these resource packages for workloads. In addition, if you only use half the resources in a package, cloud infrastructure may be wasteful and inefficient from a cost perspective. Furthermore, 451 Research indicates that there are over 3 million cloud compute SKUs in the market today. While other vendors might offer over 500 compute SKUs, OCI has taken a simpler approach.

OCI already provides features including compute instance pools, burstable compute instances, preemptible instances, and flexible compute and load balancer. This set of products covers the same breadth of capabilities as other cloud providers – with fewer, more customizable options than most. For example, if you require a VM with 9 CPUs and 27 GB of memory, you can deploy exactly that with flexible compute.  We also simplified storage by offering a single, high-performance block volume option which includes a performance SLA and up to 300k IOPS per volume.

OCI has taken things a step further with the ability to autotune resources based on workload requirements, reducing both waste and cost. We’re announcing the following features that put OCI at the edge of dynamically scaling core infrastructure:

◉ Unlimited mode for burstable VMs: A feature that will enable continuous burst, which is essential for running enterprise workloads cost-effectively. With Unlimited mode, you pay for a fraction of the CPU that you’re using with the ability to continuously burst. This feature is planned to launch next year. For more details, contact your account team.

◉ Block Volume autotuning: Block storage that dynamically scales performance within bounds that you configure to meet workload demands.

Both capabilities help improve efficiency and reduce costs because you’re only using what your workload needs. You only pay for actual usage, not peak need provisioning.

Easy-to-use services

According to a recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey, complexity in Kubernetes operations is a major pain point. Kubernetes is also going “under the hood” like Linux with 90 percent of organizations using cloud-managed services.

While OCI already offers a managed Kubernetes service, we wanted to simplify running container-based applications in the cloud even more with a complete serverless experience. Serverless solutions can enable customers to run applications without having to operate any servers, helping to reduce the complexities and overhead of managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting infrastructure. We’re announcing the following capabilities that make Kubernetes and containers simpler on OCI:

◉ Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) support for Virtual Nodes: Customers can create Kubernetes clusters that use Virtual Nodes for a complete serverless experience. With Virtual Nodes, OCI manages the full lifecycle and infrastructure operations of the Kubernetes’ worker nodes, enabling enterprises to improve reliable operations at scale without the operational burden. This feature is expected to be available soon.

◉ OCI Container Instances: A new serverless compute service suitable for customers who want to run containers in the cloud for use cases that don’t require container orchestration like Kubernetes. Customers will be able to instantly launch containers with a single CLI command or guided GUI wizard without having to manage infrastructure. Customers are charged only for the CPU and memory resources allocated to their instances at the same rate as regular OCI Compute. With simple experience, seamless operations, and no extra charge for the serverless experience, Container Instances are intended to offer the best value for running containers in the cloud. This service is expected to be available soon.

OCI continues to simplify other aspects of core cloud infrastructure through services such as Cloud Advisor, which identifies both underutilized resources and performance bottlenecks. It provides visibility across networks with features for topology visualization, troubleshooting and diagnostics, network operations planning and traffic monitoring. Flow logs provide network traffic metadata to detect security anomalies or gain traffic insights.

We’re announcing Network Command Center, a single pane of glass to provide complete visibility in the network topology, performance and security policy. Customers can use Network Command Center for troubleshooting their network configuration, plan for workload placements based on performance and security needs and monitor traffic for compliance and security analysis. Network Command Center brings all the tools that a network operator needs in a unified and easy to use interface.

Built-in security

OCI offers simple, prescriptive, and integrated security built into the OCI platform so customers can easily secure their cloud infrastructure, data, and applications. Our encryption protects data both at rest and in transit. In addition, OCI provides easy-to-use identity and access management (IAM) policies that helps you manage access and entitlements across a wide range of cloud and on-premises applications. OCI IAM’s zero-trust strategy positions identity as the security control mechanism for expanding IT landscapes.

Further, Oracle Cloud Guard simplifies the detection of security misconfigurations and insecure activities across tenants, as well as risky activities performed by operators and end users. Many security capabilities, including Oracle Cloud Guard, security zones, and vulnerability scanning, are included with a paid OCI tenancy, preventing you from having to choose between security and cost. To help our customers secure their infrastructure, data, and applications, we’re announcing the following services:

◉ OCI Confidential Computing: Advanced security to protect your data in-use by encrypting it in memory with enhanced virtualization using AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). This feature will be ideal for workloads that need extra security, and customers will be able to enable it at the time of instance creation. Confidential Computing is expected to be available by 2023.

◉ OCI Network Firewall: A cloud native managed next generation firewall service built using Palo Alto Networks technology. This turn-key firewall-as-a-service has built-in high availability that provides advanced firewall features without the need to configure and manage more security infrastructure. With the service, you can easily apply granular security rules to detect and help protect against malware, spyware, command-and-conquer (C2) attacks, and vulnerability exploits on inbound (north-south), outbound, and lateral (east-west) traffic flows to your application and network workloads. This service recently launched and is available today.

High performance

OCI provides readily available capabilities for high-performance CPU and GPU infrastructure. We offer nonblocking networks designed to match on-premises data centers. RDMA cluster networking with 1.5 microsecond latency enables you to scale your workloads on up to 512 GPUs and 20,000 HPC CPUs.

The demand for AI training and inferencing semiconductors is expected to grow to $65B by 2025. With AI training in the cloud using GPU clusters, engineers have more access to vast amounts of processing capability to improve their model accuracy. We’re now announcing availability of the following GPUs on OCI:

◉ OCI GM4 instances: Bare metal Oracle Cloud Infrastructure GM4 instances powered by NVIDIA A100 80GB Tensor Core GPUs support high-speed, low-latency clusters of up to 512 GPUs with a 1,600 Gbps RDMA network and eight 2x100 Gbps NVIDIA ConnectX SmartNICs. These instances are available on request. Contact your Oracle sales representative.

◉ OCI GU1 instances with NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation: Bare metal and virtual machine Oracle Cloud Infrastructure GU1 instances powered by NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs with the NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation software benefit from accelerated graphics for video processing, gaming, media streaming, virtual desktop and other graphics-intensive applications, as well as deep learning inferencing. The bare metal instances are available today and virtual machines are expected to be available soon.

OCI has always had a relentless focus on performance. While we excel at compute, storage, and network performance, we wanted to go a step further to improve performance at the edge. So, we’re announcing OCI Content Delivery Network, a globally distributed cloud native service that uses hundreds of edge networks to deliver the lowest possible latency for internet-facing workloads. This service is expected to be available in 2023.

Source: oracle.com

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Custom models and text translation come to OCI Language

Part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) AI services, OCI Language service allows you to perform sophisticated text analysis at scale without any machine learning (ML) knowledge. It provides pretrained models for sentiment analysis, entity extraction, language detection, and many other natural language tasks. Today, we’re excited to announce two exciting capabilities in the Language service: Customizable models and automatic text translation. These features are now in limited availability in all OCI’s commercial regions and can be accessed through OCI software developer kits (SDKs) and REST APIs.

Build your own custom language models

OCI Language enables you to train customized language models, even if you’re not a natural language processing (NLP) expert. You can train custom classification and custom named entity recognition (NER) models. The OCI Language service learns from previously labeled data, such as classified records and samples of entities extracted from text, to train the models. After you train a custom model, you can deploy dedicated endpoints to serve your requests.

Custom classification

Imagine that you’re responsible for the support tickets that come into your company. Each day, you receive thousands of tickets that need to be routed to specific departments. In the past, you had humans perform this task. With this tedious work, keeping your employees excited about their work is difficult. Over the last couple of months, your employees have routed thousands of tickets to the right department. Wouldn’t it be great if AI could help them?

Using OCI Language, you can create a custom model that learns from all the work the humans have done in the past.

When the model is trained on previous conversations, it can classify any new requests automatically, freeing humans to perform less tedious tasks.

OCI Language allows you to host the custom models on dedicated endpoints. Depending on the expected throughput you need to handle, you can assign a larger or smaller number of inference units (a unit of compute) to your endpoint.

We described a support ticket classification scenario, but the same principles apply to other use cases, such as document classification, clause classification, and intent recognition.

Custom named entity recognition (NER)

OCI also supports the ability to identify terms that are unique to your domain, such as product part codes, manufacturing terms, and specific financial entities. You provide sample data with labeled entities to train a custom NER model that can then be used to automatically identify the entities in text.

To illustrate the types of problems that using custom NER can solve, let’s continue our support ticket use case. Imagine that many of the support tickets you receive deal with shipment issues. You want to extract critical information from each ticket, such as the order ID, the shipment date, and the name of the recipient.

Using OCI Language, you can automate this process, but first you must gather the training data. OCI Data Labeling, a service for labeling datasets, can help you label the data to train such a model. It allows you to define the custom entities, and then mark the location of those entities in the text, as shown for the following examples:

With the labeled data, you can train your own custom NER model. OCI Language provides an intuitive workflow to create and organize models. You can also evaluate global and entity-specific metrics to help you identify other data that you need to further improve your model.

When you’re pleased with the quality of the model, you can create a dedicated endpoint to automatically perform the entity extraction for you. So, you to convert unstructured data (language prose) into structured data, enabling you to automate downstream processes!

Text translation

OCI Language now allows you to automatically translate text across 21 languages. This exciting feature uses state-of-the-art AI neural machine translation techniques to translate text at scale with high accuracy. Sample use cases of automatic text translation include building multilingual chatbots, automatic application localization, translation of support tickets, article translation and any kind of application that helps you understand others globally.

We’re always expanding our language coverage. At the time of this blog post, the following languages are supported:

◉ Arabic (ar)

◉ Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR)

◉ Czech (cs)

◉ Danish (da)

◉ Dutch (nl)

◉ English (en)

◉ Finnish (fi)

◉ French (fr)

◉ Canadian French (fr-CA)

◉ German (de)

◉ Italian (it)

◉ Japanese (ja)

◉ Korean (ko)

◉ Norwegian (no)

◉ Polish (pl)

◉ Romanian (ro)

◉ Simplified Chinese(zh-CN)

◉ Spanish (es-ww)

◉ Swedish (sv)

◉ Traditional Chinese (zh-TW)

◉ Turkish (tr)

You can experience the text translation capabilities from the Oracle Cloud Console.

Source: oracle.com

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Use Oracle Enterprise Manager data with OCI to unlock new insights

Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.5 customers gain greater operations, capacity planning, and forecasting insight by enabling rich Enterprise Manager target-level data and sharing it with Oracle Cloud Observability & Management platform services. Enterprise Manager transfers data from managed targets and Oracle Management Repository (OMR) to OCI Object Storage, where it is accessible by Oracle Cloud O&M services like Operations Insights, Logging Analytics, etc.

Gain greater insight from the data Enterprise Manager already collects  

Oracle Cloud enables new storage, processing, and machine learning technologies to help customers solve more business problems using target-level data already collected and managed by Enterprise Manager. It helps eliminate custom scripting, warehousing building, or the need to have extra hardware or storage onsite to perform IT Operational analytics and planning.

Customers configure Oracle Enterprise Manager to transfer data from the targets it manages and the Oracle Management Repository (OMR) into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Object Storage, enabling it to be securely accessible by Oracle Cloud services. Once OCI connectivity is set up, data automatically and routinely uploads to OCI Object Storage to enable a data lake. IT Operations and DBAs then use OCI Operations Insights to perform capacity planning and forecasting activities from Enterprise Manager data and other sources. Prerequisites for this capability include: customers should already have the Oracle Diagnostics Pack licensed or add it, and have an Oracle Cloud account set up with credentials and connectivity as detailed in the EM 13.5 documentation.

The following graphic illustrates how to target data flows from Enterprise Manager to an Oracle Cloud service once the configuration process has been completed.

Figure 1: Oracle Enterprise Manager to Oracle Cloud Flow

Set up and configure Enterprise Manager to target data flows to an Oracle Cloud service

Step 1: Export Enterprise Manager data to OCI

For target data to move from Enterprise Manager to OCI, create an OCI Bridge in Enterprise Manager. The OCI Bridge defines a data connection to the OCI Object Storage bucket residing in the Oracle Cloud. The user needs Super Administrator privileges for this one-time setup.

Log in to Enterprise Manager and from the Setup menu, choose Export EM Data to OCI.

Figure 2: Choosing Export EM Data to OCI

 

Then the Manage EM Data for OCI Services page displays. Note that it will be empty the first time you access it. Click the Enable Data Export tab.

Figure 3: Managing EM Data to OCI Services

The OCI Service Data Export dialog displays as follows:

Figure 4: Setting up an OCI Bridge

Click the + to the right of the Source text field and the Select Group dialog displays.

Then, select a group that contains the targets for which you want data exported to OCI and then click Select Target Group. Either select an existing OCI Bridge from the drop-down menu or click the + to create a new OCI Bridge as shown below.

Figure 5: Configuring an OCI Bridge

 

Enter the OCI properties.

The Save As field displays an auto-generated bridge name (you can optionally change the name). Click the Test button to the right of the field to validate the properties you entered.

When you are all done with your entries, click Submit to create the OCI Bridge. Note that only one OCI Bridge per OCI service is allowed.

Step 2: Import Data from the Object Storage Bucket to the OCI Service

Once you've set up an OCI Bridge to enable data to move from Enterprise Manager to the OCI Object Storage bucket, you will need to create an EM Bridge to move Enterprise Manager target data from the Object Storage bucket to your OCI service for processing.

Setup OCI Bridge and target groups in OCI to validate configuration worked

Once you've successfully created an OCI Bridge in Enterprise Manager and selected one or more target groups for data export to OCI, the Manage EM Data for OCI Services dashboard will show the current upload status for each service including the groups that have been added for each service.

Figure 6: Validate the configuration works

Connecting EM to Oracle Cloud enables data lake capabilities so users can harvest rich metric, database telemetry, SQL, and other configuration data for operational analytic reporting and forecasting use-cases.

Bridge

◉ Connects EM with OCI - harvesting metric, SQL, and configuration data for deep operational analytics

◉ Provides visibility and analytics across multiple EM installations

Data Lake

◉ Automated Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) of EM data to Oracle Cloud

◉ Enables capacity planning analysis, trending, and forecasting on long-term metrics and configuration data

◉ Allows other cloud services such as OPSI to provide visibility into the performance of critical workloads including Exadata, Oracle Database, and more

Source: oracle.com

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Enhancing Database and Apps Troubleshooting with ML Driven Log Analytics using EM OCI Bridge

Enterprise applications are becoming complex by the day and the ability to analyze log data generated by different systems easily is critical for ensuring smooth business operations.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is Oracle’s premier monitoring solution for on-premises and cloud environments. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services can take advantage of this valuable set of telemetry data to perform further resource analysis.  Oracle Cloud Logging Analytics is a cloud solution that allows you to index, enrich, aggregate, explore, search, analyze, correlate, visualize and monitor all log data from your applications and system infrastructure on cloud or on-premises. 

Enterprise Manager (EM) users can now set up cloud bridge to import their target model data like associations, and properties information into Oracle Cloud Logging Analytics to start analyzing logs in a few steps.

EM collects detailed information, from managed targets such as configuration necessary to locate log files and hierarchical relationships between entities to enable topology views of applications and infrastructure components. Logging Analytics EM integration automatically builds the topology view across the application stack to help app, IT, and database admins troubleshoot availability and performance issues quickly.

Figure 1: Oracle Enterprise Manager OCI Bridge and OCI O&M Services

OCI Bridge

◉ The EM targets which represent the on-premises resources are equivalents of entities in Oracle Cloud Logging Analytics. Therefore, you can leverage the discovered targets in EM to achieve faster onboarding in Logging Analytics.

◉ The topology in EM, including that of complex composite targets is retained and reproduced in Oracle Cloud Logging Analytics. 

◉ Relevant target metadata in EM is stored as entity properties in Oracle Cloud Logging Analytics enabling better monitoring of those EM resources.

◉ The entity properties are periodically updated with the target information that is transferred from EM to OCI Object Storage, and in turn, collected by Oracle Cloud Logging Analytics using an EM Bridge.

Below is the high-level architecture and steps for integrating Enterprise Manager with OCI Logging Analytics:

Figure 2: EM and Logging Analytics Cloud Bridge Architecture

1. Configure OCI Logging Analytics EM Bridge & OCI Object Storage Bucket.

2. Configure EM to start sending target information to the object storage bucket in your tenancy.

3. Enable logs collection for the discovered entities in Logging Analytics using Management Agent

Once setup entities will be automatically created in Logging Analytics along with their relationships and application tiers. 

Figure 3: Auto-created entities in Logging Analytics, collected from EM Cloud Bridge

Next step is to enable log collection for the discovered entities in Logging Analytics using the new Add Data guided wizard.

Pro Tip: You can enable auto-association of each source for any entities discovered in the future.

Figure 4: Enabling log collection for auto-created entities

At this point, the log collection will start from the EM targets into Oracle Cloud Logging Analytics. You can view them in the log explorer. You’ll also see a topology view of the targets harvested from EM. Below is an example of E-Business Suite topology automatically created in Logging Analytics after configuring the cloud bridge.

Figure 5: Example topology view of an E-Business Suite environment harvested from EM

The entity topology view in the scope filters can be used to visually select entities for filtering logs, and understanding their relationships while troubleshooting issues.

Figure 6: Sample Application Dashboard

Source: oracle.com

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